Péter Zilahy was born, raised and educated in Budapest, Hungary. His collection of poems, Statue Under a White Sheet Ready to Jump, was published in 1993 and has won the Móricz Zsigmond Prize. His dictionary novel, The Last Window Giraffe, was published in 1998 and has been since translated into 22 languages. Among other awards it has won ‘The Book of the Year Prize’ in Ukraine in 2003 and influenced the Orange Revolution in 2004. Zilahy has had exhibitions of his photos all over Europe and has performed with a CD-Rom based on the novel in 28 countries. In 2001 he was a visiting scholar at New York University. In 2002, Ludwig Museum Budapest held an exhibition of his selected photographs and interactive works. In 2003, he had an exhibition in Akademie Schloss Solitude, where his book of short proses, Drei, was also published. In 2007, he published a collection in Budapest with the title Three plus 1 written in seven genres. In May 2007 his theatre play Der lange Weg nach nebenan was performed in Volksbühne, Berlin, then it went on touring Germany in Leipzig, Stuttgart, Weimar and Düsseldorf. The play was published as a book by Passagen in 2008. Zilahy regularly writes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Guardian and The New York Times. Zilahy Péter (the Hungarian name) is presently a fellow at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.